Bob Dylan Bragged About Playing at a Popular Club, but They Turned Him Down the Moment They Saw Him
In his pre-fame days, Bob Dylan played clubs in Greenwich Village. Here, he found his audience and a great deal of success. Dylan also tried to navigate the folk scene in Cambridge, though he had markedly less success here. Dylan wanted to play at the popular Club 47, but they turned him away on the spot. Still, he bragged about playing shows there.
Bob Dylan wanted to play at a club in Cambridge
Club 47 was a coffeehouse turned music venue several blocks away from Cambridge’s Harvard Square. Though the club’s cofounder, Joyce Chopra, described the area as “the hinterlands,” it attracted many folk artists, including a teenage Joan Baez. She commanded audiences night after night.
“I knew I could do what the other folk singers were doing and a lot better than them,” Baez said, per WBUR. “In my mind I was still the girl kids used to taunt and call a dirty Mexican, but I could sing. I realized that was something I could do to prove that I was valid, and I liked it a lot more than going to class.”
When Dylan arrived in Cambridge, he wanted to find similar success at Club 47.
The club turned Bob Dylan away, but he played there for free
Musician Bob Neuwirth, who would become Dylan’s road manager, brought him to Club 47, and Dylan expressed his interest in getting a job there.
“I took Dylan over there and afterwards he said, ‘I’d like to get a job here,'” Neuwirth recalled, per Bob Dylan Roots. “This was when they had those big plate glass windows, and people could look in and see you on stage.”
Dylan and Neuwirth walked back to discuss this with club owner Paula Kelley.
“I vividly remember Bob Dylan coming in as a really scrawny, shabby kid,” Kelley said. “He’s the only person I’ve ever seen with green teeth.”
She turned him down on the spot. Still, this didn’t stop Dylan from playing free shows at Club 47 and bragging about it later.
“Singing in between sets for nothing and then going out and saying that he’d sung at the Club 47,” Kelley said. “It’s so funny now to look back.”
He eventually found success in New York
Dylan made important connections in Cambridge, but he didn’t find mainstream success there. He had much more luck in New York. Here, he befriended a number of other folk musicians and played clubs around Greenwich Village. He received positive reviews, and enough people believed, even early in his career, that Dylan was something special.
“Bob was literally just sitting in the back of the club typing on a typewriter,” Jake Maymudes, the son of Dylan’s tour manager Victor Maymudes, told Rolling Stone. “The few people there knew he was something special. Since my dad was a manager, he went out of his way to potentially manage him.”
His second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was a breakthrough for Dylan. After its release, he began a quick rise to success.
